Vista & Windows 7 with TurboCAD

The main problem that Vista threw up for me was disappearing doors and windows, a feature that I came across as I was demonstrating the software to a bunch of designers – not the best time to discover a fault. You’d create the door or window as usual, but as soon as you chose another tool, your creations disappeared. It took me some time to find out that I had to download something from the Vista site to get these tools working – for me that’s a job too far, so I re-instated XP.

When Windows 7 came along all I heard and read was good, so I had it installed on my training machines and Mac lap top, running under Parallels. All seemed to be fine until a chap phoned me a couple of weeks ago who was having trouble with the pipe tool not working. Unfortunately I’ve discovered that the tool does not work in either v16 or v17. I’ve spoken to Dave Taylor of IMSI who has told me that more and more they are having problems with the SDK based add-on tools on Vista and Windows 7. The good news is that the re-writing of these SDKs is an ongoing project. So it will be back at some point. The bad news is that I can’t give you a date for it to be up and running.

However, Dave has made a short movie, attached below, to show an alternative way of achieving the same solution to using the pipe tool. It’s a little more complicated, although not much and it does have the advantage of being a more flexible solution.